As I promised in the last post this will be an art update. Do you have your beverage? Got it? Ok. Here we go.
To be honest it seems like a bit of a whirlwind though I know it wasn’t. I finished up the Iguana and the Galah and got them off to the photographer who turned them around pretty quick which was awesome. And I posted them on my art prints store, so they are available now.
I may have mentioned in a previous post that the Iguana was the most detailed and complex piece I’d done in stippling. When I choose a piece for stippling, I have tended towards interesting but not overly detailed, like with scales or something like that. Partly because of the size of paper I was working on. I suspect among other reasons was a lack of confidence. Could I actually do something detailed and complex in stippling and make it look good? I can say that after finishing the Iguana I don’t worry about complexity as much.
The Galah was a piece that just needed to be done. It was so striking and compelling. But I did have some trouble with it that I partly attribute to the paper I was using which was not the paper I had been using and it behaved much different. I’m still pleased with the outcome.
The piece I started after the Iguana and Galah was the Penguin pair. I’d had a friend suggest I do a piece that had more than one subject in it because he wanted to see more depth which you get better with multiple subjects instead of just the one in more of a portrait framing.
Fortunately, I’d taken a picture of a couple of Humboldt Penguins together. So, I decided that would be the next piece. Since I was doing two subjects and I wanted to do a stippling piece I thought I needed more room to get the right amount of detail and fit them both on the page properly, so I got out the biggest watercolor paper I have. The 18 inches by 24 inches Penguins piece is the largest stippling piece I have done so far. For those that are wondering how long it took, I’m not sure. I didn’t keep track. Though I will keep track for the next stippling piece that I start fresh. A reasonable guess would be that it took at least 40 hours. That’s based on a giraffe piece that I did previously that I know took about 15 hours.
I often will let a painting sit a few days before I sign it and declare it finished, since I wanted to get started on my next piece, I sat it aside on and easel that faces the door of the art studio so any time I walk past I see it. It’s a good way to catch things that need adjusting. It sat and didn’t need adjusting.
One day, while working on the penguins I made a trip to the art supply store for that easel and a few other things. When settling up at the register I got to talking to one of the clerks and as part of the conversation I was sharing some photos on my phone of my art and scrolled past a piece that I started several years ago and put aside. It’s a stippling painting of an Ovation Celebrity guitar. It was one of my guitars at the time and I had the idea then of doing paintings of guitars, or parts of guitars, the defining or interesting features and headstocks. I did the headstock of my Les Paul as a first try and then decided to try the Ovation. And decided to go bigger. Oh. It’s in color and on canvas board. Both of them, the Les Paul and the Ovation. I finished the Les Paul and got a long way through the Ovation and stopped. I stopped for various reasons, some were silly, and some were probably related to the process.
Anyway, as I was talking guitars and art with the clerk it occurred to me that I should probably see about fishing up the Ovation. We also discussed the idea of doing more guitar artwork, much along the lines of what I had been thinking a few years ago, when I started the Ovation piece. So, when I got home and setup the easel, I pulled out the unfinished Ovation stippling painting and put it up there so I could think about how to tackle it.
How to start was the big hurdle to overcome with the Ovation. A lot of that had to do with the areas that I’d already worked on but knew needed to either be finished or needed another layer of dots and I was going to need to color match, or color, close, match. So, I decided the easiest way to get back into it was to start on the areas I hadn’t touched at all. The first thing I tackled was the background. Originally, I had planned on a grey or dark grey background but was concerned that might kill the piece, it might not let the guitar stand out very well. Instead, I decided some Payne’s Gray mixed haphazardly with some white could give a really nice, mottled effect. I did try mixing some black for grey in as well, but it didn’t work really well so the Payne’s Gray all the way. Which, as a note, the background is not stippling, it’s just brush work so that it doesn’t take away from the stippling part. Once I finished the background it really made the rest of the painting, though it wasn’t finished, it popped, and I got excited about working on it.
That’s what you want, right. To be excited to work on a piece of art.
With the background done I moved on to the trim or the binding and purfling since it was right next to the background. The binding on the neck is a slightly different color from the body of the guitar so I did that and the fret inlays first. It was a good way to get back into the stippling part of the piece.
That was one of the biggest parts of working on this piece, the colors. Most of the colors had to be mixed and since it takes so long to do parts of it, I had to mix enough color to last through to that section being finished as well as a little to be lost to evaporation. Even with covers, lids, and plastic wrap, the ink does still dry out sooner or later and it is often much sooner than I prefer.
The other big part was the size. At the time I started it, it was the largest stippling project I’d attempted. The Penguins are larger. It is the largest color stippling project I’ve done. Also, there was a lot of coverage needed, as well as the detail involved. Which probably as something to do with why I stopped working on it. At the time I think I got burnt out on it and a little overwhelmed because I thought there was still so much more to do to it and yet I had worked on it for so long.
As I’ve worked on it there are a few things that I’ve noticed or remembered that probably also contributed to my walking away for so long that would have been related to frustration.
The first of the frustrations is that it’s on canvas board. It was pre-prepared and then I added a grey colored layer to it because I thought it would enhance it. That didn’t eliminate the texture though and the texture is a frustration when doing stippling. Add to that, the fact that I’m doing stippling with a dip pen. It gets a bit annoying to try to get dots in places, but the ink keeps ending up in the valleys of the canvas texture. I apparently didn’t find this annoying after completing the Les Paul painting or I would probably have done something different. I know it bothered me enough after working on this for a while that I experimented with adding a thick layer of gesso and then sanding it smooth. I still have my test board. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Another of the frustrations was discovering, or realizing, that most of the inks are at least semi-transparent. That means that getting good coverage and brightness out of them was time consuming because it took many more layers of color than it might have on a lighter colored base instead of my medium grey. Coupling that with the size of the project and how much of the canvas needed to be covered lead to a bit of discouragement. Probably a good thing I did the background first and got excited about it this time. It means it’s been easier to accept those things.
Another thing I was reminded of while working on it this time is that working with the acrylic inks has its own challenges. There’s the potential for being messy, yes, but all paints and pastels have that problem. They clog the dip pens. Anything with white added is especially bad. But they dry on the nib as I’m working and so I have to stop periodically and wipe the nib down completely before I can continue. And there is the mixing issue that I’ve already mentioned.
Even with all of that, I have managed to get the Ovation painting to a point of possibly complete. I have set it on the easel for its waiting period and will make that decision soon. I could easily go in and add more layers of dots to the body of the guitar or even the fretboard, but at a certain point you get so much saturation that it is difficult to see the dots and identify the piece as a stippling project. So that’s the dilemma right. How much do I do to make it the most impactful and yet not so much that you can’t tell how it was done. I think it might be at its sweet spot.
Which leaves me at a new starting point with some choices. The first choice is what to create next. Normally I have something decided already and I just keep going. This time I haven’t decided so I’m torn between types of projects, watercolor, black and white stippling, a guitar piece which has so many more things to consider. I’ll let you know next time how that turns out. Cheers.